Sunday, March 3, 2013

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Sigil 0.7.1. This release streamlines some of the new features introduced in 0.7.0. It also, as always, includes a handful of bug fixes. Please see the changelog for a full listing.

One really useful new feature is the ability to right click on an image url in Code View and view the image in a separarte window. The image in this window is resizable so it will always fit within the window.

The clean source settings were streamlined. This is part of a set of changes to deal with saving and opening non-well formed content. With 0.7.0 Sigil would allow you to save non-well formed HTML files even though they are invalid. However, this introduced an issue where if auto cleaning was enabled on open Sigil would "fix" the non-well formed content. This would often lead to issues. So now Sigil warns when saving non-well formed content so it's not done accidentally. Finally, when opening if non-well formed content is encountered Sigil will prompt to ignore cleaning those files.

Spell check and find and replace were both enhanced. User feedback in their behavior and fixes were made for issues reported by users.

Finally, a change was introduced to deal with EPUBs where the filename within the container is not UTF-8 encoded. The EPUB spec says that the filename must be UTF-8 encoded but some tools (and zipping by hand) do not always use UTF-8. Instead they use the standard ZIP encoding (IBM code page 437). This isn't a problem with ASCII characters but becomes an issue when non-ASCII characters are used in the filename. Specially the filename is decoded incorrectly so it doesn't match what's listed in the OPF. Now Sigil will check if the general purpose bit 11 is set which specifies that the filename is UTF-8 encoded. Sigil will only decode the filename using UTF-8 if this bit is set and otherwise decode using cp437.